In today's society with the proliferation of personal computers in the home and the ability to easily connect to the Internet, electronic shopping has become much more common. In the most common scenario, a buyer wishing to procure an item from a merchant visits the merchant's web site. The web site allows the buyer to select the desired item to ascertain its price and to purchase the item if so desired. Once the buyer clicks on an icon designating the intent to buy the item, the buyer is immediately confronted with a screen that needs to be filled in with the personal profile of the buyer. Typically, the buyer is required to provide, as a minimum, their name, address, and a credit card number to which the cost of the purchased item is to be charged. Additionally, the buyer may be asked if they want their personal profile saved so that the data they just entered will not have to be reentered each subsequent time they wish to purchase an item from that same merchant. If the buyer desires the personal information to be saved, they will have to provide a user name and an associated password. The user name and password need to be provided each time the buyer wants to purchase an item from the merchant's web site in order for their personal profile data to be automatically made available.
While the above payment system is currently used, it has a number of serious drawbacks from both a merchant and a buyer perspective. First, it is a single merchant/multiple buyer system. Therefore, each time a buyer wants to purchase a product from a different merchant a complete registration/personal profile data entry must be completed for the specific merchant's system. Since different merchants often require user names and passwords of different character lengths or require specific alphanumeric combinations for such user names and passwords, the buyer is often presented with the situation where multiple user names and passwords must be remembered and correlated with the correct merchant for each purchase. Secondly, where credit card payments are utilized, the buyer still receives a credit card bill so that the online transaction doesn't have the feel of a cash transaction. Thirdly, from a merchant's perspective, in the situation where very low cost items are being sold online, it is not economical to permit these items to be paid for by credit card. That is, credit card companies might charge 20-35 cents and an additional charge of 2-3% of the item value per credit card transaction. Accordingly, the credit card transaction costs associated with low cost items (for example under $5.00) effectively prevent a satisfactory profitable sale of such items in this manner. These low cost purchases are referred to as “micropayments” and most often are associated with the sale of articles or magazines that could easily be sold and delivered online in a digital format if the micropayment profitability problem was overcome.
In addition to the above, other issues confronting electronic payment systems which must be overcome before widespread acceptance by merchants and buyers alike is achieved include:                A] The electronic payment system must operate for most Internet merchant settings. That is, since many small merchants sell goods on web sites hosted by others, they have little or no control over the software that their hosts will provide. Thus, the electronic payment system is most desirable if it does not require any additional software to be resident at the web site host.        B] The system should operate for most Internet buyer configurations so that users who access the Internet through online services and corporate networks protected by firewalls can effectively use the system.        C] Since most buyers are still very concerned about the security and privacy of the personal and financial information they provide electronically, the system must protect the privacy of this information in a manner that builds user confidence.        D] Merchants must feel they are protected from the theft of their products, particularly with respect to digital content sold and delivered over the Internet. Reasonable measures must be taken to ensure that only Internet buyers that have paid for the digital content actually receive the digital content from the seller.        E] The system must manage keys and other security based information for buyers and merchants.        
Yet another problem confronting online transactions concerns the efficiency at which digital data is processed. Buyers, in particular, want information presented to them without delay. Accordingly, improvements to online transactions systems are required to more efficiently provide buyers with real time information.